Comment 42 for bug 653619

The short answer wrt official backport of Evolution 2.32 to maverick is that it's unlikely given the amount of work, a number of people who can do that work, and the proximity of 11.04 release which will ship with 2.32. The longer explanation is below.

The reason for not changing the status of the maverick task is that, when I've asked Scott to close the lucid one, I have not yet evaluated backporting of Evolution 2.32 to 10.10. It was a long night, I just did a bunch of testing and I simply didn't take a look. I haven't assigned myself to the bug, because it might have been read as the indication that I'm working on the backport through the -backports pocket - it hasn't been a case a week ago. Since then I've spent some time backporting 2.32 to 10.04 and kept the work in my PPA - that, and my work, didn't leave me much time to even take a look at maverick.

I've spent some more time tonight working on that and my current opinion is that the official backport to maverick is just not worth the work it would take. Just evolution requires backporting 2 other packages: evolution-data-server and gtkhtml3.14. Both Evolution and e-d-s ships libraries that other packages are depending on, and there was an ABI bump which means that those packages will require at least a rebuild.

The number, and nature of changes required to do an official backport of Evolution to maverick makes it impossible - they won't be accecpted by the archive admins, they are against the official policy.

That being said I will provide Evolution 2.32 in my PPA[1] as a part of the upgrade path from lucid to natty.

Also, if anyone is interested in starting testing Evolution 2.32 for 10.04 I've started uploading packages to this PPA: https://launchpad.net/~kklimonda/+archive/evo232 - they will never make it to lucid-backports but it is a solution for those who can't update to 11.04. If you don't like the idea of using PPAs for this (I don't) then start nagging Launchpad people to provide an official way for developers to provide some kind of thrusted repositories.

DISCLAIMER Those package were not thoroughly tested, and should not be installed on production systems, I expect that, with enough feedback, it will take at least a month to make them stable enough. Some really weird bugs may show up, I may end up backporting much more packages to make them work with new libraries from evolution and e-d-s, it is also possible that it will never get stable enough for broader audience DISCLAIMER

[1] Really, PPAs are the only sane way of doing such an update without throwing a team of dedicated developers who can spend time on both backporting and QA of the resulting packages.